What not to write if you want me to read your thing -- Garbo

-- 3500 words of Nothing Burger because that's your self-defined quota 

-- things that really ought to be just in your private diary


-- the story of your miserable high school experiences unless you were someone extraordinarily interesting, like the world's only talking hippopotamus


-- yet another chapter of a manuscript you won't admit you lost interest in months ago

-- fiction in which one character pours out buckets of Ayn Rand dialogue which is entirely your political/cultural worldview


-- fan fiction based on the characters from the TV western "Bonanza"

-- tales of secret wars between teenage girls using magic powers


-- cruel roman à clef stuff about people who let you into their lives a long time ago

-- ­­stories about a Caucasian detective or street cop or private investiagor who has one cool friend, a person of color, who can let them into neighborhoods or clubs or crime lairs where they'd never be allowed unescorted

-- post-apocalyptic stories in which someone with mad archery or blowgun skills appears just in time to save you from certain death at the hands of neo-barbarians, risking future conflict with a vicious gang, because your dweeby self seems to be more than the average displaced sys-admin

-- mysteries in which women who share a hobby know who killed a murder victim stained purple from floating for twenty-four hours in a wine vat

-- retellings of fairy tales 

-- stuff that is half as good as you know it could be, but you don't feel like going back and doing revisions and edits

-- science fiction stories in which one smart, brave fellow and one slim, attractive women go to a new planet to repopulate the universe with their smart, brave, attractive offspring


-- really, anything that doesn't make you feel that you were born to do this work



                                                                              

                                                 Garbo

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